Professional What?

Firstly, I’d like to thank Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, authors of ‘Good Omens’, for the title of this blog. Anathema Device, the Professional Descendant of the novel, is not a genealogist but it seems like a good job description for someone who has based a career on who their ancestors were. Anathema is a descendant of the witch Agnes Nutter and appears to have inherited some of her ancestor’s talents. Having long suspected there were some Nutters in my own family tree I feel a certain kinship with her!

These days I spend most of my time researching other people’s ancestors and I felt it was time my lot started earning their keep. This blog will be a place to tell some of their stories, to celebrate them and to air some of the family’s dirty laundry. I also intend to include some extracts from the records I come across whilst carrying out research and to discuss some of the broader questions raised by the study of family history.

My own ancestors are a mix of English, Scottish and Irish. A fairly ordinary bunch but at times quite a challenge to trace. What fascinates me about family history is not only the process of research, piecing together small scraps of information to reconstruct a person’s life, but also what it can reveal about social history and human behaviour, the insight it gives into a world that can seem very different from our own but populated by individuals with our strengths and our weaknesses, our virtues and our failings.